Enchanted Forest

The Enchanted Forest opened a month after Disneyland — August 15, 1955, Howard Harrison's storybook park on Route 40 outside Ellicott City, where the Three Little Pigs, Humpty Dumpty, and the Old Lady's Shoe were built child-sized in papier-mâché and concrete. For thirty-four years it was the Baltimore-Washington baby boom's first theme park — 300,000 visitors a summer at its peak, the wooded paths past Willie the Whale and Cinderella's Castle.

The end came in pieces — the park closed in 1989, a shopping center went up on the parking lot in 1992, and the forest sat padlocked behind the castle façade while teenagers broke in and photographed what one blogger called 'Candyland after a neutron bomb strike.' Robin Hood's barn burned in 1990. The ruins became their own attraction — the decay documented by generations of photographers who grew up on the park and came back to find it.

The ending was a rescue — Martha Clark spent over a decade moving the surviving figures, piece by piece, to Clark's Elioak Farm, finishing with the entrance castle itself in 2015. The file keeps both parks: the abandoned forest behind the shopping center, and the second forest on the farm where Mother Goose got a second life — the rare abandonment story that ends with the characters saved.

The Enchanted Forest is the archive's storybook file — the 1955 nursery-rhyme park that outlasted itself as a ruin behind a Safeway, until a neighbor moved Mother Goose, the castle, and the pieces to a farm and gave the park a second ending.